Have there been any serious efforts at time travel by credible entities, such as the military, or large corporations. If so, where can I find information on these experiments. So far, every thing I find on the web is by lunitics screaming about government conspiracies & cover ups & ufo’s & what not. (Art Bell stuff).
You can’t find anything about time travel experiments except by lunatics? What are the odds? Obviously there is a conspiracy of silence to squelch the serious investigations.
There’s only been one serious effort which has shown any signs of promise. The Chronological Division of the Department of Transportation and Teleportation, which was instituted in 2095, finally managed to send objects into the future (without relying on near-lightspeed travels or any other cop-outs like that) in 2117. Atomic-sized particles were sent back in time for the first time in 2133. Finally, on 26 Jun 2139, the entire power output of all the power stations on Earth, the Moon, and in Solar orbit were diverted for 45 seconds to the ChronoDiv Labs, where a 17 microgram sample of neutrons was sent back in time approximately three hours. I think they concluded that there’s no upper limit to how much or how far back they can send matter, but that it’s just not worth it. That’s the Government for you.
Here’s the URL, but it won’t be active for another 108 years:
chronologicaldivisionofthedepartmentoftransportationandteleportation.gov
So far the best as I can figure is that time travel is theoretically possible and practically impossible…for a variety of reasons…among which are:
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Truly insane amounts of energy required (possibly approaching infinty…which, for reasons that should be obvious, can never be achieved).
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Mind melting paradoxes (i.e. grandfather paradox).
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Suggests a ‘destiny’ for everyone. If you can travel into the future then it’s already happened. Free will goes down the tubes unless you subscribe to the ‘Many Universes’ theory (i.e. an infinite number of Universes that represent ALL possible outcomes).
While the ‘Many Universes’ theory is almost certainly unprovable it’s not as far fetched as it sounds (see: Sliders on the Sci-Fi channel).
The Sliders reference may be flip but it can be reasonably argued that that is a possibility.
Myself? I like the idea but it is kinda way out there. I reserve judgement.
I don’t know about credible institutions, but a few credible physicists every so often come up with some new theory. The most famous being wormholes, which theoreticaly could/might/maybe be used for time travel but only for matter only a couple atoms wide. If you’ve got time to waste goto ibm’s patent site http://www.patents.ibm.com and do a couple searches, at the very least you’ll get their quantum powered teleportation device.
Actually, the military is one institution that has conducted experiments with time travel. Specifically, travel into the future, which is not only possible, but happens every second of every day. But on a VERY small scale. They put to the test, awhile back, the theory that time is related to altitude and speed. Theory was, two people born at exact same moment, one on a high mountain, one at sea level, the mountain man would age slower. Anyway, the Navy (I think it was Navy, or Air Force… anyway) synchronized two atomic clocks using a laser. One was in a plane circling the ground based clock. They found that in fact, time actually slows down (relevant to the ground based observer) when speed and or altitude increases. Of course, this difference in time is measured in milliseconds or so. Ergo, everytime you fly in a plane, you actually travel ever so slightly into the future. On a bigger scale, this tells us that if you were to fly away into space nearing the speed of light, and returned, for a total of, say, 24 hours (your time), you would return to the Earth, where hundreds or thousands of years have passed (dont know the specifics). Time travel. Cool, huh?
C
Heck, I’m traveling in time right now.
I think that time travel to the past is kind of impossible, but into the future (at an accelerated rate than normal, that is) would be. But the thing is, there is no practical reason for time travel like that.
Sure there is! Haven’t you ever heard of cryogenics? A terminally ill person gets frozen, kept at liquid nitrogen temperatures until we can revive him and cure his disease, and then he’s brought back, cured, and can live a longer life, financed by all his investments that have compounded due to compound interest. In fact, it might one day be fesable to get frozen just to wait for long-term investments to pay off. Imagine: Buying a few CDs (Certificates of Deposit), going into cold storage for a few years, and wasking up to a bank account a few million dollars fatter. There are plenty of practical reasons for a one-way trip.
There is no “grandfather contradiction”. You cannot travel back in space, period. What is possible is this: twin brothers part. One travels at great speed and the other one doesn’t. After a while they meet and find out that while one has aged 1 year, the other has aged 3 years. There is no paradox or contradiction here.
I’ll assume that the OP is wondering about time travel into the past, travel into the future being relatively easy. No, nobody’s doing experiments with it yet, primarily because nobody is yet sure of just what experiments to do. There are, however, people working on the theory of it. The leading researcher, so far as I know, is an American physicist by the name of Kip Thorne. I believe that he’s currently at the California Institute of Technology. His research is focused mainly on wormholes; there may be other methods. The first person to do give the matter any scientific scrutiny was Gödel, in the thirties or so. Unfortunately, his method depended on the Universe having some interesting properties, which we since have pretty well ruled out.
On another, more philosophical note: The possibility of time travel is completely consistent with free will. Suppose that next week, I develop time travel, and come back to today and tell me that I had Cheerios for breakfast tomorrow. Does this take away my choice of what to eat tomorrow morning? Look at it this way: I know that I had Rasin Bran for breakfast yesterday. Does that mean that that wasn’t a choice?